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The Many Botanical Journeys of Mary Gibson Henry
1200 miles in 90 days. On horseback. Through unmapped territory. Through blizzards. In her fifties. Through Canadian wilderness. In the 1930s. With 12 carrier pigeons in case of emergency. To collect rare plants. This was how Mary Gibson Henry (1884 - 1967) rolled Henry’s road to becoming one of the great botanical adventurers of her, or any, age, was a long delayed one, but when it came, it came with a vengeance. She was born in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, in 1884, to a moth
Dale DeBakcsy
Mar 11
On the Highways and in the Hedges: Kate Furbish’s Botanical Century.
In 1870, botany in the state of Maine was an underdeveloped and precarious thing. In the 1670s, John Josselyn had published a brace of...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 17, 2025
Raising Nature Girls: How 18th Century Botanist Catharina Helena Dörrien Created Girls' Science Education.
Pondering the Enlightenment, one's thoughts tend to turn Frenchwards. The verbal barbs of Voltaire, the neuroses of Rousseau, the...
Dale DeBakcsy
Mar 1, 2024
Janaki Ammal And the Fight for India’s Botanical Future.
Caste. Race. Gender. These were the three categories that, in early twentieth century Madras, combined to determine the boundaries of...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
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